


Down the Lonely Road

by hellostarlight20



Series: Ten/Rose [8]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, I'm Sorry, Nothing but angst, angsty angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-07-15 19:24:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16069691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellostarlight20/pseuds/hellostarlight20
Summary: Tenth DoctorPre-Season 3Angst. Nothing but angst.900 words of angst. Just so you know.





	Down the Lonely Road

The Doctor sat in yet another room he had shown Rose. After Ancient Rome and the statue, and—they’d spent time here, talking, wandering. Together. He sat in this room an offshoot of an offshoot of who knew where in the TARDIS. He sat there and stared at the Gallifreyan art he’d managed to collect over the years.

He wasn’t even sure how he’d managed that.

But here it was, lining endless walls, sculptures on the floors, hanging from the ceiling. There were stuffy Time Lords still given to creativity. Not many, not by his time, but art was a form of civilization and the Time Lords prided themselves on being civilized.

The Doctor lashed out. Struck the closest item and smashed his arm through the transdimensional painting. The glass shattered but he didn’t care.

Rage choked him, clawing at his throat. Blinded him. Cut off his air. He screamed, picked up a statue of a Cat of Gin-Seng, one of the sentient cats-like species of Gallifrey and hurled it into a wall.

He didn’t even hear it crash though he watched the heavy stone shatter. His ears rang with rage.

With unending sorry and heartbreak and grief and loneliness.

Breathing heavy, hearts beating erratically, the Doctor crumpled to the ground.

“Why?” he heard himself ask.

The word repeated over and over, a litany of unanswered questions. 

Why? Why her—why Rose—why his Rose—why-why-why?

He thought he heard the TARDIS sing mournfully, a comfort of loss, tears of their joint pain. That might’ve been his own crushing sorrow.

Gasping for breath, unable to fill his binary system no matter how he tried, the Doctor crawled from the room into the corridor. Across to another door.

The gardens. They spent so much time here. Together. Laughing. Talking. Exploring his ship—his home. Their home.

“No.” The Doctor scrambled backward, tripping over himself, falling to the hallway when he didn’t even remember standing. “NO!”

The door vanished.

His pain did not.

His throat burned, and his ears once more rang with his own screams. His hands throbbed from hitting the wall or the floor. He couldn’t tell any longer.

And suddenly the TARIDS shuddered and jerked out of the vortex where they floated for days. Weeks. Years. The Doctor didn’t know and didn’t care.

Nothing else mattered.

Not anymore.

His beloved ship shuddered and…landed

Guilt twisted his stomach. Or pain or grief or self-loathing or any number of emotions he was certainly in no position to deal with. He didn’t need to look at the monitor to know what happened.

“I told you I don’t want to be here!” He screamed at his ship, rage pouring out of him, spewing forth with an energy he hadn’t felt since—since... “I don’t want to be here! I never want to see this planet again!”

She’d landed several times. Places he needed, or She thought he did. Memories.

New Earth—he peeked out of the TARDIS doors and slammed them shut as soon as he saw the skyline.  
Powell Estate—he hadn’t even opened the doors then, merely looked at the building on the monitor then ripped the thing off its hinges.  
Women Wept—he’d never return there. Not ever again. No matter how beautiful or how cherished the memories.

Storming into the console room, determined to stop—just stop everything. His ship, his mind, his aching hearts, his shredded soul, he grabbed the grating and yanked up. Tossed it away. Another piece. Another.

No more, he couldn’t—he just couldn’t.

Paper fluttered up at him. Notes.

Doctor, don’t forget the milk.  
Doctor, we’re out of blackberry jam from that planet with the flying lizards that are apparently not dinosaurs.  
Doctor, stop tinkering and go to sleep. Even Time Lords need sleep.  
Doctor, come find me when you see this. I’m in the library.

He collapsed onto the remaining grating and clutched Rose’s handwritten notes to his chest. To his hearts. He’d forgotten he’d saved them, kept them in a neat pile as if they were love letters. Eyes closed against tears he hadn’t shed since that final goodbye, he breathed in the faint scent of her perfume and the ink she liked from Merida IV.

Smoothest pen in the universe, she said.

He’d bought her a dozen of them.

“I don’t want to be on Earth.”

He looked at Rose’s notes but spoke to the TARDIS. Broken. 

She beeped, sympathetically, but insistently.

“Please don’t make me.”

Another beep.

Slowly he opened his eyes and looked to the monitor. Damn ship, She’d replaced it—again—and now angled it so he could see the plasma coils attached to the hospital.

“I don’t want to.”

The Doctor buried his face in Rose’s notes and allowed himself one final moment of—grief and pain and love and emotion and hope and sorrow and happiness and Rose.

“Rose.”

Fingers infinitely gentle, the Doctor carefully placed Rose’s notes in a neat stack and placed them gently on the console. One finger caressed the loopy letters of his name in her writing. Then he sniffed everything back, behind his Time Lord façade, behind his smile, behind his tattered shield.

Whirling for his room, he quickly showered and changed. He wouldn’t wear this shirt or tie again. They were Rose’s favorite. Never again.

Less than fifteen minutes later, he walked out of the TARDIS and toward the hospital and its mysterious plasma coils.


End file.
